Guild Wars 2

An experiment, if you will: I’ve been rather negative recently on GW2:HoT, so I’ve decided to make a positives-only thread to encourage ANet with positive reinforcement.

Why be positive after being grumpy? Well, my grumps haven’t gone away, but I’m still playing, so there must be something fun in HoT.

Background: I’m mostly a PvE/WvW play, with 2400+ hours since release. I played GW1 from the Sorrow’s Furnace update thru now, so I’ve been here a while. In GW2, I have 6 level 80s, two decked in full ascended right down to rebreathers and backpacks and even underwater weapons.

I’m largely playing my Necromancer at the moment, using WvW to unlock the Reaper specialization (80%). Reaper is a wonderful new trait line and skill set. I’m loving how it plays in all areas of the game. Great work, ANet.

My other main is my first character, a ranger. I’m not fond of healing, so I don’t play druid. Ranger is in a good place now. At this point, longbow feels fine and Fluffy the frost drake is working for me. Yup, old boring pet for roleplaying and personnel fondness. Pet feels sturdy and useful now, recent changes are good.

The masteries are interesting. Love gliding. Have Pact Commander mostly done, probably won’t worry about other Tyria masteries as I don’t care about legendaries at all.

I’m going slow in the new content, not rushing. It’ll be there awhile. As a one-handed man, I find the jumping/gliding a challenge, but a doable one.

Basically, the game is what it’s always been for me: A distraction / relaxation. I stopped taking games very seriously ten years ago in my late 30s. For me, games need to be fun, and I don’t care about aspects I don’t play. In this case, raids (hardcare in WoW thru BC, gave up on it as stressful, not fun) and PvP (beyond WvW, looking forward to big fix for that, Colin!)

GW2 still has fun things to do. So I’m still here.

I honestly thought of making a very similar thread this morning.
I do have complaints about HoT but with no real fixes in yesterday’s patch note I’ve decided I don’t really care. Not going to fix TD meta? Ok I’ll play PvP like Anet wants. Raid is to hard? Then I won’t do it. Not going to balance adventures for people with less than 60 fps and 100ms ping? I’m fine with silver.
Its very relaxing to just embrace the game for what it is now and still enjoy it.
TL;DR Its more relaxing being anet’s sheep and getting the most out of it you can.

well not going to say i was negative about hotr ive been mostly positive

i love gliding and seeing how long and how high i can go actually wish there was other places to go with it

i like the reaper and herald the best of the elites and new classes. but i still got to try out a few other havent tried daredevel or the eles elite. i also dont care for the druid.

masteries i think are fine right now. i think they are supposed to take time to do them and mine are.

map in hot from what ive seen and i havent seen everything im slowly working my chars through them are good maps although a bit confusing in places but time will change that.

wvw new maps and changes when i first heard them i thought id love them. autoupgrade i decided i do hate it think someone should be there to upgrade manually. new guards around fortesses are better harder to take down the towers and stuff tower bosses are better take longer makes fight more interesting and longer. the new maps i dont care for the pathing of them and yes ive gotten to know them spent 3 times a week in bordderlands and yes the borderlands are getting a few more now lately. i dislike some of the new mechanics of the new maps. i think id prefer the ruins to the monuments and thier blessings..

ive been doing a bit of pvp since the updATe cecause of the legendaries are part of it so i got forced to do that now but im not ticked about it. im glad i can do it with a few friends and not forced into mainstream pvp and yes we got a private arena and i like to contribute to it.

im giving the hot exspansion a 7 out of 10 its got things it needs improving on and some should be reverted back but a lot of decent stuff in it

Gliding is by far my favorite thing added to the game since launch. I love gliding. I don’t love going back into core Tyria and forgetting I can’t glide and jumping off stuff, but I love gliding.

I love the Verdant Brink. I think it’s my favorite area in the game now. I particularly like night there. It’s a blast to play and level up the outposts and kill one of the bosses. It’s like the Silverwastes, but with more options.

I like flying around in the canopy and discovering stuff. I even like many of the minigames lag and all. I’m happy I can get away with silver on most of them, because living in Australia makes those minigames tough to get gold on.

We had a VB zone completion event in our guild yesterday. 20 people showed up for it, and we had a good time. We got about 80% of the zone done in one go. It took a bit longer than expected because herding cats and not everyone had stuff like Nuhoch Wallows unlocked so we needed more time and a couple of mesmers. But everyone had a good time.

Sometimes it’s good to take a game at a slow, relaxed pace. Personally, I really don’t find GW2 as a good game for that, but I recently bought Pillars of Eternity on sale from Steam and have found that it suits that type of gameplay very well (single-player text-heavy RPG).

• The 64-bit client has meant about 10-15% faster load speeds for me.
• I like that they’re thinking about visual clutter.
• The Merciless weapon set has a higher percentage of skins I find appealing than is usual for the BL Skins.
• I hope that ESports works out for ANet.

64 bit client is great, but I had more speed improvement by moving the game to an SSD.

I love the many many green numbers that pop up <3
(Im playing a druid)

I’m having lots of fun in Heart of Thorns and it’s disheartening to see so much negativity here, but I suppose people who are happy tend to play the game rather than write on the forum.

Verdant Brink and Auric Basin are fantastic zones, and I even find Tangled Depths fun so long as I don’t take it too seriously and accept getting lost and going in circles a few times. I mustered the patience to zone complete it, my revenant has completion of the first three zones and is missing only one vista in Dragon’s Stand that seems to require ley line gliding…

It’s a shame the Tangled Depths meta is so hardcore, I don’t have the play time to dedicate to getting into a group that will succeed at it. It feels unintended, but they’re not patching it or saying anything; who knows? At least the three other zones’ metas are in a good place — not trivial, need everyone to have an idea of what to do and be playing attention, but will probably succeed so long as those basic requirements are met. I feel that higher levels of difficulty are better left to more constrained environments without the open world issues of map instancing and random noobs in Nomad’s gear (raids, etc.)

They haven’t done so well with some of the professions (on my thief, I feel unable to defend myself, with no particular advantage over my other characters gained in exchange). But equally others are great fun. I recently rediscovered my elementalist, and I’ve been having a literal blast running around blasting the warhorn at things. Discovering I could take out a whole pack of those pesky pocket raptors with one well placed air overload was so satisfying.

Mapping core on my Revenant has been great fun.

Ummm….yeah that’s about it…

Somewhat off topic but this sentiment triggered my reply.

Sytherek.7689:

GW2 still has fun things to do. So I’m still here.

After grinding SW and chest runs for a few ascended weapons, I got tired of the expensive goal-driven grind. My joy was always just relaxing, exploring and enjoying the adventure. During my journey to fully expore all four HoT maps (which proved to be a lot of work), I found myself frustrated if my goals were blocked or if it took longer than expected.

I tome-leveled my Revenant to 80 because I’d rather apply experience to mastery tracks as I learn how to play the class. I wanted to open up waypoints for all world bosses and found myself happy and relaxed as I ran around enjoying the beautiful scenery and participating in random events simply because I wanted to. Or going out of my way for a vista, POI or heart quest just because (world-completion is not a goal; I’ve already done that three times). It reminded me what I liked about the game in the first place and how my attitude/expectations/focus/priorities became skewed and robbed me of the fun.

I still enjoy GW2 also, and we do obviously need more positivity on the boards, but it’s very, very important to realize the reason we don’t is almost entirely due to Anet’s egregiously lousy communication along with the perception that we have been asked to pay too much for too little.

These things happen organically, and the responsibility for fixing it falls squarely on Arenanet’s shoulders.

Been rather on the same page with this:

Heart of Thorns did a lot of good things:
- Gliding
- Masteries
- Elite Specializations
- WvW maps (despite all my complaining)
- Better attempts toward impressive maps
- Bouncing Mushrooms
- Adventures (great exp gain watering holes)
- New creatures finally
- Story in Open-World instead of instancing
- Story on the fly instead of having to stand around
- Minimal encounter with story
- I always enjoyed story, but it was very clunky and sometimes just impossible solo
- Better communication by Anet +1 Einlanzer on that.

Tabloids prove it. The various news feeds…feed on it. People love complaining and since most people are social animals, they love to have others feel miserable with them. But it’s really an unhealthy position. The ‘woe is me’ status of many of the complainers can’t appreciate just how much work Anet has done or how good it is compared to many past games. REALLY! It truly is a good game.

Of course, it has stuff that isn’t to everyone’s taste or desire, but overall they’ve done a good job of producing on what people want.

I love the gliding.
Masteries are good. It’s an interesting way to drive the further development of your character. (I would have opened up multiple mastery lines to each character, however…maybe three different lines. You choose one and that’s it. No switching or going back. The lines could focus on different aspects of combat instead of forcing a character to accept whatever is predetermined. It might be fun to have a ranger, for example, that was super adept at seeing hidden enemies, stunning them and moving rapidly in for a kill.)
The new hero points and mastery points are fun to work at.
The bouncing mushrooms are great.
I love the guild halls. I hope it doesn’t take to much to get them up and running. I know it’s been a complaint.
I really love playing WvW I solo sometimes. I run in a zerg or with a guild sometimes. The new maps are interesting. I wish I could glide in the new borderlands. That’d be great.